Vincent Nichols, recently ordained as Archbishop of Westminster, is not afraid
to speak out about the erosion of family life - or Liverpool's chances next
season

Standing in the shade of a magnolia tree in the garden of the Gallia Londres, a four-star hotel in Lourdes, Archbishop Vincent Nichols is deep in conversation with two teenagers.

They are among a group of 800 pilgrims from the diocese of Westminster whom he has brought with him to the French market town that is home to one of the most important shrines in the Christian world.

However, their discussion is devoted not to spiritual questions, but to the forthcoming football season. The Liverpool-supporting archbishop has been trying, unsuccessfully, to persuade the young pilgrims of the error of their ways in following Chelsea.

Archbishop Nichols is a rare Church leader, equally comfortable talking about the transcendental as the trivial.

It is a different scenario from only a matter of weeks ago, when he was drawn into the child abuse scandal that had engulfed the Irish Catholic Church. Despite condemning the catalogue of abuse published in a 2,600-page report after a nine-year investigation into Ireland's Catholic-run institutions, he faced fierce criticism for suggesting that the clergy who admitted to committing the acts had been "courageous". It was a lesson in the level of scrutiny he will be under as leader of Catholics in England and Wales, a position he took up in May.

"I look back over my life and sometimes ask, 'How can I be Archbishop of Westminster?'" he says. "A miracle of Lourdes is that people lose their self-pity. I could at times be quite despondent about being archbishop."

His admirers would argue that his rise to the top of the Church was inevitable. He was marked out for promotion as a young priest, with such influential figures as the Archbishop of Liverpool, Derek Worlock, and Cardinal Basil Hume, pushing his cause.

Educated at St Mary's College in Crosby, Merseyside, his birthplace, before training for the priesthood at the English College in Rome, they most likely spotted a sharp intellect and smooth manner, which he now deploys with the guile of an experienced politician.

"Essentially I'm quite a private person," he says. "And [this appointment] means I won't get much privacy any more, and every word I say will be picked over. It's not as if it's for a few years. It's till, you know, it's till I, er…" He pauses: "It's for the rest of my life."

Such an evasion, as though he is somehow afraid to talk about his own death, is particularly striking in Lourdes, where the archbishop believes that many pilgrims come to confront their sense of mortality.

Hundreds of thousands of pilgrims visit each year hoping to be cured of illness. Wheelchairs are ubiquitous along the narrow streets and people hobble on crutches to the grotto where they believe the Virgin Mary appeared 150 years ago. For the 63-year-old archbishop, the real hope comes from the way that they are treated.

"In most places, somebody in a wheelchair would be considered a bit of a nuisance, but here they're given acceptance and a little bit of honour."

The archbishop's belief in the "nuclear family" has been forged by his close relationship with his own clan, who are strong Catholics. Nevertheless, his own brother, John, who was disabled after a car accident, challenged him over his decision to become a priest. The archbishop replied: "I think it's what makes sense of who I am."

Archbishop Nichols returns to Liverpool to see his family as often as is feasible, and enjoys spending time talking in good local pubs.

Indeed, publicans have an improbable ally in the archbishop in their fight to halt the widespread closure of pubs, as he sees them as a microcosm of society at its best.

"There are pubs where people have their corner, and they're a bit eccentric, but they're welcomed. If they don't turn up, someone will go and see what's happened."

It seems no coincidence then that the pub has declined as an institution at a time when he believes individualism and greed have risen. He fears this is undermining communities and eroding "the common good", which Pope Benedict XVI referred to in his recent encyclical, warning that its loss would have grave consequences for humanity.

The archbishop sees as a case in point the push for the acceptance of assisted suicide, which received a boost last week after Debbie Purdy, who is terminally ill with multiple sclerosis, won a landmark court battle that campaigners fear could lead to more people dying in foreign "suicide clinics".

"Assisted suicide seriously weakens the fabric of mutual responsibility within society," he says. "It does so because the person thinks of themselves as an isolated individual or unit, and that their decisions have minimal impact on everybody else.

"It leads to the idea that people who require a lot of care ought to be moved even further off of the scene. Once the principle is that a human life is disposable by age or illness, then it won't be the sick person who is making the decision, it will be somebody else who makes it for them."

He refuses to countenance the suggestion that the same relaxed laws that exist in Switzerland will be adopted here. Abortion, for example, was illegal until 1967, and now around 200,000 women have terminations every year. "I would hope that we as a society could reflect on some of the enormous damage that's been done through easy access to abortions, particularly on women who are pressurised to have them and carry the consequence of their action for the rest of their lives," he says.

"I would dearly hope that the lessons of that corrosion of the protection for the young born is not now repeated in a corrosion of the protection of the elderly."

Regarded as a liberal when he became Archbishop of Birmingham in 2000, in recent years he has been more orthodox in his Churchmanship and support of traditional Christian values.

He led the Catholic Church's opposition to the introduction of equality laws, which forced the closure of the Church's adoption agencies, and spoke out against the Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill.

His latest concern is for the future of British society. Although he welcomes the Government's moves to create more flexible working hours, he suggests that they could do more to support the family. "For a long time, it's been the finding of research that the breakdown of the family is a huge contributor to social cost. I think it would be good if policy-makers could think of ways that they could support the family: give tax breaks and more incentive to people to marry and stay together."

He takes this position not out of some ideological view that other patterns of family life are inferior, but rather, he says, because "the pragmatic evidence is there that children fare best, grow best, and then eventually contribute most positively to society when they enjoy that stability in childhood".

I suggest that the Centre for Social Justice has been proposing that the Conservative Party adopt similar policies. Last month, its chairman Iain Duncan Smith published a paper recommending that married couples should have to endure a three-month "cooling off" period before divorce.

"We want to slow down the rush towards irrevocable decisions, to help people to pause and to ponder a bit more deeply," he demurs. "It's still perfectly clear that a divorce is a trauma that takes a great deal of getting over."

So he is encouraged by the direction in which the Conservative Party is heading, then? At this, he smiles knowingly, too sure-footed to align himself with a political party. However, he has shown himself unafraid to speak out on political matters when necessary.

In 2006, he forced Alan Johnson, then education secretary, to back down over plans to force Catholic schools to give a quarter of their places to non-believers. It was an embarrassing climb-down for the Government.

He also expresses concern that the internet is creating a world of shallow friendships.

"There's a worry that excessive use or an almost exclusive use of text and emails means that, as a society, we're losing some of the social skills needed for building a community. Too much exclusive use of electronic information dehumanises what is a very, very important part of community life and living together."

Back at the hotel, teenagers mix with the elderly and priests chat with Tony, a tattooed skinhead. It's an unlikely scene – but it's a snapshot of the kind of community on which the Archbishop believes British society should be built.